Friday, January 08, 2010

Mrs Robinson — MP for Strangford, member of the Northern Ireland assembly, alderman of Castlereagh borough council and wife of Northern Ireland's first minister — was a frequent customer of William (Billy) McCambley's butcher's shop in Ballyhackamore, east Belfast. His young son Kirk would help out in the shop, and first got to know her in the late 1990s when he was still at primary school.

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But it was not to remain a mother-son relationship; by mid-summer 2008 the couple were having an affair.

It is difficult to overstate the shock Mrs Robinson's admission on Tuesday provoked in Northern Ireland. Both Peter and Iris Robinson are vocal evangelical Christians from a deeply religious and conservative unionist culture.

Mrs Robinson's transgression was the more astonishing given the controversy generated last year when she described homosexuality as an abomination on a par with paedophilia that made her nauseous. As the BBC programme coyly noted, the passage in Leviticus that she quoted contains similar sentiments about adultery.